Philosophical
Perspectives
on Suicide
Kant, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein
Paolo Stellino
Philosophical Perspectives on Suicide
PaoloStellino
Philosophical
Perspectives on
Suicide
Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
andWittgenstein
ISBN 978-3-030-53936-8 ISBN 978-3-030-53937-5 (eBook)
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PaoloStellino
Nova Institute of Philosophy
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
LISBOA, Portugal
v
According to Baruch Spinoza, “a free person thinks about death less than
anything, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life”
(Ethics, IV, 67). Writing a book on the philosophy of suicide does not
necessarily mean to meditate on death. is is what I tried to explain—
often with no success—to all those friends and colleagues that in recent
years kept asking me why I had chosen to work on such a gloomy subject.
Of course, I could have reminded them of Camus’ well-known opening
words of e Myth of Sisyphus: “ere is but one truly serious philosophi-
cal problem and that is suicide.” But the fact is that whereas I am not
persuaded by Camus’ claim, I am truly convinced that meditating on
suicide means, to a great extent, meditating on fundamental questions
that directly concern life, not death. Among others, these questions are:
How do we conceive our obligations to society, friends, and family?
Which is the set of moral values according to which we choose to orien-
tate our life? Which is the value that we give to our autonomy and free-
dom? Is this value non-negotiable? And how do we conceive dignity? Is it
a “property” that, in specic situations, can be undermined or
deteriorated?
I began to take interest in these questions almost fteen years ago
when, almost accidentally, I attended a session of the seminar of the
Bioethics Research Group of the University of Valencia. At the time, I
was still a PhD student and the subject of my dissertation (on Nietzsche
Preface
vi Preface
and Dostoevsky) had little to do with bioethics. Juan Carlos Siurana
Aparisi, the director of the research group, drew my attention to the fact
that Nietzsche’s stance on suicide was almost unexplored by bioethicists.
I began looking for Nietzsche’s remarks on suicide in his writings and
posthumous fragments. What struck me immediately was Nietzsche’s
joyous and almost poetical conception of free death. e possibility of
conceiving death dierently, that is, as a festival was something new for me.
I left Spain in 2010. At the time, I had two main concerns: to nd a
post-doc position and to work on the English translation of my disserta-
tion. I temporarily set aside my interest on the topic of suicide and
devoted myself completely to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. It was an inter-
national conference on Kant and Nietzsche, held in 2012in Lisbon, that
gave me the occasion to work again on the philosophy of suicide. From
that moment, suicide has been, somewhat intermittently, one of my main
topics of research. e idea of writing this book occurred to me some
years later, when I noticed that there was a l rouge that linked Kant’s,
Schopenhauer’s, Nietzsche’s, and Wittgenstein’s views of suicide. I will
motivate my choice to place these four philosophical perspectives on sui-
cide side by side in the Introduction, so that there is no need to dwell on
it here.
Some chapters of this book are based on material previously published
in P. Stellino, “Nietzsche on Suicide”, Nietzsche-Studien, 42 (2013):
151–177, and in P.Stellino, “Kant and Nietzsche on Suicide”, Philosophical
Inquiry, 39/2 (2015): 79–104. Although in both cases I heavily reworked
their content for this book, I would like to thank both journals for per-
mission to revise and reuse these publications.
My research particularly beneted from the works of three specialists
on the philosophy of suicide: Margaret P.Battin, Héctor Wittwer, and
Michael Cholbi. Wittwer’s book Selbsttötung als philosophisches Problem:
Über die Rationalität und Moralität des Suizids particularly helped me at
the initial stage of my research to understand the complexities of the dif-
ferent arguments that are put forward in the debate concerning the ratio-
nality and morality of suicide.
Lisbon PaoloStellino
23 April 2020
vii
I owe a great debt to the following friends and colleagues who read single
chapters of this book and provided me with extremely valuable feedback:
Roberta Pasquarè and Lorena Cebolla Sanahuja (chapter on Kant),
Christopher Janaway and Vilmar Debona (chapter on Schopenhauer),
Marta Faustino and Maria Cristina Fornari (chapter on Nietzsche), and
Vicente Sanfélix Vidarte and Modesto Gómez Alonso (chapter on
Wittgenstein). I am also most grateful to the anonymous reviewer for
providing very useful critical and constructive comments on the entire
manuscript.
I would like to thank Brendan George and Lauriane Piette, from
Palgrave Macmillan, and Charanya Manoharan, from Springer, for their
help and support. I would also like to thank João Constâncio for kindly
supporting my work since the rst day I arrived in Lisbon. I should also
mention that this book would not have been possible without the sup-
port of the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).
A part of this book was written during my stay in Montpellier. I would
like to thank Pascal Nouvel for welcoming me at the Centre d’Éthique
Contemporaine. A special thought goes to Nadia El Eter and Guillaume
Bagnolini, who shared with me the daily routine at the Centre.
A word of gratitude goes to all the friends who, inside and outside
academia, near and far, have accompanied me during this journey. I can-
not help mentioning Maria Cristina Fornari, Luca Lupo, and Pietro
Acknowledgements
viii Acknowledgements
Gori. In particular, I shared with Pietro all the ups and downs of the
academic life as well as the experience of building a new life in a new
country with our respective families.
Finally, I am deeply thankful to my family for their constant support,
and to Audrey for her love and for sharing her life with me (despite the
fact that I am a philosopher). E lucevan le stelle…
ix
1 Introduction: Bringing Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
and Wittgenstein Together 1
References 9
2 Immanuel Kant: The Moral Duty of Self- Preservation 11
2.1 Contextualizing Kant’s Prohibition of Suicide 11
2.2 Arguments from the Lectures on Ethics 23
2.3 Arguments from the Published Writings 40
2.4 Concluding Remarks 64
References 66
3 Arthur Schopenhauer: The Metaphysical Futility of Suicide 71
3.1 Schopenhauer’s Critique of Religious and Philosophical
Arguments against Suicide 78
3.2 Schopenhauer’s Metaphysical Worldview 90
3.3 e Futility of Suicide 100
3.4 Concluding Remarks 117
References 118
Contents
x Contents
4 Friedrich Nietzsche: A Free Death at the Right Time 123
4.1 Voluntary versus Involuntary Death 131
4.2 Free Death and Quick Death 143
4.3 Meaninglessness and Suicide 155
4.4 Concluding Remarks 173
References 174
5 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Suicide as the Elementary Sin 179
5.1 e Sources 189
5.2 Wittgenstein’s View of Ethics 199
5.3 Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Suicide 208
5.4 Concluding Remarks 221
References 223
6 Conclusion: What Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and
Wittgenstein Can Teach Us About Suicide 227
References 240
Index 243
